Making Waves at Walden

It’s arguably one of the most famous ponds in the world.

Almost 65 acres wide and 103 feet deep, Walden Pond was immortalized by the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau who regularly boated and bathed here, walking its 1.7-mile perimeter while playing a wooden flute and paying close attention to nature.

I tell him it doesn’t seem right if we don’t take a quick dip. It’s an eight-hour pilgrimage to drive to this iconic site in conservation history, a celebrated place of literary inspiration that’s been known to “reduce English majors to quivering hyperventilating groupies,” as one writer put it.